Drawer #7.3: Mop Knobs Tutorial

So here’s how it goes if you are me: you’re planning just a quick simple post - a visual ode to the humble stripy mop - sparked by something you’ve heard on the “radio,” (1) which leads you to thinking of a certain Chinese artist’s Mop (2) and when you look him up, you find his planning drawing (3) which leads you to wondering: exactly how are those mop knobs made anyway? (4) which leads to taking one apart (5, 6, 7) and which then - you can’t very well leave it undone, 
can you - is harder to reassemble than expected…and so on until the afternoon is done & the post is not.

1. The spark, a story from Adam Gopnik as told to On Being's Krista Tippett:

John Updike was once asked why — for an ad, I think, like a whiskey ad or some crazy thing — why are we here? Why do we live? Sounds like a ridiculous question, but he had an instant answer for it. He said, “We’re here to give praise.”  We’re here to give praise.

2.  Black Broom, 2000, by Chen Zhen, a Chinese artist from the 90's, drawn to the same sorts of humble objects that I love - street chairs, mops, t-shirts - but who infused them with great scale & explosive energy, creating exuberant, life-affirming installations…and sadly, passed away too young.

Chen Zhen images via design boom

3. Chen Zhen’s drawing for Black Broom depicting how the mop “strings,” attached at the top in the direction of the mop handle, are flipped over - like a chignon! - to form the mop knob.

4. But that, as it turns out, is not how the real mop is constructed.

5. Mop dissection shows that the strips of stripy t-shirt material are actually laid in both directions from the end of the handle. It’s the strips laid along the handle that make the mop full & dense; use Chen Zhen’s drawing as a guide, you end up with a very stingy mop.

6. A thick band of an alternate fabric, folded on itself & wrapped around the intersection of the two sets of strips, is nailed in four places into the pole. This is the part where you wonder what tools the maker had at hand: it’s a right pain getting that cruddy nail to pierce thru all those t-shirts layers & then it all bounces back as there’s no hard resist on the opposite side of the handle…

7. And then, stripy strips in place, you flip, and voilá, the chignon/knob! Wrapped twice around with…ha! aluminum wire! So there’s no rust! (You are probably bored to tears by now, but me, I am so pleased to discover this detail…)

The great John McPhee, in his wonderful essay, Writing By Omission, makes the argument for putting less than the writer knows into an essay, leaving more “white space” for you, the reader. I’m here to say that I did leave a few things out - the man occupying a street corner, all his mop-making supplies laid out on the ground beside him (but you can read about him here), and the university student w a mop on his head (who is here.) 

From "The View in Fragments," the Stripy Mops vitrine. Shmigel 2011,  Mixed media, 8.5 x 12.5 x 6.25"
Photo: Bruno David

But what I still must tell is what I realized while writing: that I need to turn one of the knobs in the drawer on its side; while the stripes & colors give me great pleasure, it’s the knobs that really make me love these mops.  

Quietly handmade, crafted where so little here is, crafted just to the level they need to perform their function, therefore elegant but entirely humble. And ubiquitous: in the entryway of every household goods store, & there must be at least one to a street, over stacks of bad-quality plastic bins & all matter of cheaply manufactured goods, there they are, reminding me of some one individual maker, some “fellow traveler” out there working away by hand.

So there you have it. If you are me, your sense of life purpose is confirmed & renewed: we are here to give praise. 

Photo: Bruno David

Drawer 7.3 from top:

1. Mop knob, bought in a cranky old neighborhood in the north of the city, at Qiqiuha’er Lu,

irresistible during lunch break from an project planning meeting at an architecture studio 

2. Medicine tin (see post on TCM)  

3. The rest of the mop #1

4. Another irresistible mop due to classic pink & orange color scheme, from a shop on Jixiang Lu,

just around the corner from home & a bit of found wire, one part I always pick up scrap metal bits on  the street, one part homage to Henrik Drescher's Nervenet

Related: Drawer #1.5: Stripey Mop; Drawer #6.7: Opera Mops; Drawer #8.1: Traditional Chinese Medicine

Drawer # 6.7 : Opera Mops

There are not a few days when I wonder what exactly happened to my aesthetic in China, "shanghaied" by a color palette too highly & discordantly keyed for my "real" taste, by a maximalism of decoration & pattern & tacky materials not at all in keeping with my pre-China work. I mean, was there any way to even imagine ten years ago, while welding rusty steel sheet into industrial forms, that I would some day arrive at this drawer?

Sometimes, when I look at this Shanghai work from outside myself, it puzzles me: is it my real work or some crazy detour down a road somewhere between the Beijing Opera Props Shop & the peddler's cart...

There's a piece of art school advice that I sometimes hear in my head. Not a piece of advice I'd think to give, but I've heard it from students who have heard it from their teachers: that the trick to making work that's authentically yours is to make art as you did when you were a a kid. And this work I make now, without much in the way of tools or equipment, certainly is that: a return to making something simply out of what's at hand.

And then there's what I think of as the DP [displaced persons] thing. A friend here, the writer Lisa Movius, likes to point out that while we foreigners think of ourselves as "ex-pats", we're really economic migrants just as much as the "floating population" of laborers come to the city from the Chinese countryside.

Which is an ironic turn in life for me, the child of immigrants, albeit political rather than economic refugees, people who found their way to America post WWII via DP camps. The experience of which was vivid to me as a child as it dominated the conversations of the adults around me. "Oh," they'd slap each other on the back after church & say, "I haven't seen you since Camp." By which they didn't mean Summer.

It struck me one day, at the performance of an english-language theater company, that life here is in its way kind of like DP Camp: a microcosm of the world left behind recreated in a foreign place. Theater erupts as soon as any group of exiles congeals: there was a theater company in the DP camp at Bertesgarten where my mother & her family were interned and even in some of the concentration camps. There's clearly some essential human need that's satisfied by the interpretation of life thru drama. Art doesn't even need community, just materials, as witnessed by the things that made it from DP camp to my parents' house in Queens: from packages of silk stockings, scrap bits of backing board used for paintings; parachute silk for embroidery; aluminum cans for bracelets... not unlike the detritus of Shanghai that end up in the drawers.

That's what I'm thinking when I'm outside the work.

When I'm inside the work, at my best, I'm amusing myself, indulging in the over-the-topness that the material world here inspires...wondering how to turn this latest stripey mop on its head...with an assist from a willing student in an American Culture class... and into Beijing Opera headware. Taking it from functional object to gesture to object transformed... the quotidian become theater.

Last night at the Lit Fest, with this post nearly written, I got to see Chris Doyle, my favorite of all cinematographers, and, with director Wong Kar Wai, the creator of some of my favorite Chinese films, In the Mood for Love,  & Chungking Express. Doyle, his head shaved by Ai Weiwei, in a multi-media presentation called Away with Words, interviewed himself thru his Chinese incarnation, Du Kefeng, about process, motivation, meaning, language/wordlessness. It was transcendent: one of those [rare-ish] moments when you feel the glory of your calling.

I was too transfixed to take notes. What stays in mind is Doyle circling in, again and again, to the need for engagement with where you find yourself,  to revealing the things, masked by familiarity, that an outsider's eye can see and finally (the one quote I did write down) to manifesting "the bridge between what you see and how you respond to it."

So maybe it's not a detour, maybe I'm not as lost as I thought I was. Still, it's kind of a weird aesthetic...

If you happen to be in the northeast far-reaches of Shanghai, please come try on the Opera Mop & other hats made from household goods & pearls at "Shanghai Crowns & Fascinators." Opening Tues, March 19th, 3-5 pm. Thanks to the Center's director, Jenny Tarlin, for the opportunity!

American Culture Center
University of Shanghai for Science & Technology
516 Jungong Road, Yangpu
Shanghai 200093021 5512 3295 (China - Office)

From the top: 1 & 4.  Pompoms from Beijing Opera headware, fake pearls; 2 & 3 fragments from headware (metal screen, epoxy, paint, blue fabric, wire springs & fake pearls) in the pattern of "happy clouds"  See post # 16 for related images. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David

Drawer # 1.5 : Stripey Mops

Despite my endless fascination with the human condition, I find the day-to-day business of dealing with actual humans a bit exhausting. 

Maybe it's because I'm an introvert. Or maybe it's that, as a maker, I believe in the secret life of objects. Whatever it is, I'm always thrilled to encounter an object that I can antropomorphize. In my pre-China days, it was the overlooked architecture of factories and agro-industry: watertowers, dust collectors, grain dryers...

These days, it's the Stripey Mop. 

The ubiquitous stripey mop, made from T-shirt fabric, which you might know from trying to clear up a spill with a t-shirt, is really not a great absorbent material. But never mind, at less than a $1US you can't beat the price. And so they hang out everywhere, from the most local courtyard to the service closet at the poshest hotel. And if I see a good one, even though I know the neighbors will be gossiping about why the foreigner has yet another mop tied to the back of her bike, I can't resist adding to my collection.

Once, in very early days here, I saw an old man with all his mop-making paraphernalia spread out all around him on a street corner. Wood handles, various colors of t-shirt strips, plastic wrap for the initial attachment of strips to handle, binding wire to secure the mop's topknot all precisely lais out like in a diagram of the procedure. To his amusement, I stopped to watch for a while but, in a rush to elsewhere, took no pictures. Given the ubiquity of the mops, I expected to see the makers often. But I never have yet again, not once. It's always interesting that: that when you are new to a place, a tourist, the place sometimes opens up to you in a way that it won't again once it has absorbed you.

                                     The View in Fragments: Mops, 2011

                                                 Mixed media in glass vitrine, 8.5 x 12.75 x 6.25

                                                 Courtesy Bruno David Gallery 

                                                 Photo credit all above: Bruno David 

                                                 Photos below: mine from the industrial sweeping supply shop. Note bamboo broom in use.